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LMJ12 CD Companion Introduction

Pleasure from Gdansk till Dawn

Eastern Europe does not exist. In its place we find---from the outside as well as from the inside---a strangely multilayered bundle of experiences, opinions and prejudices dating from various historic periods, and still forming moving constellations of self-understandings and identities. Hungary and Croatia were not part of the Ottoman Empire to the same extent as were Bulgaria or Serbia, for example. Slovakia and Poland were part of the Eastern Bloc, but not Slovenia and Croatia, who were formerly part of "bloc-free" Yugoslavia. The Czech Republic and Slovenia will probably be part of the European Union soon, which one could not say with the same confidence of some of the others mentioned here. And actually prior to all of this was what some Slovakian musicians very intently and proudly call the "genius loci," the ingenuity of the vernacular, the driving force of each region's own tradition.

The one former frontier appearing most obvious to us, the Iron Curtain, once arbitrarily defining what the West thought to be East in Europe, slowly has begun to dissolve, and in the loosening of this rigidity a number of the other stories (re)appear, historically remote ones as well as those written by today’s markets. Participants in Slovenia’s techno scene see themselves on the same lines that run from Rome to Berlin, from Istanbul to London. Experimental free-improvisers from Hungary play with an Austrian musician. A Slovakian electroacoustic composer remixes Western European iconoclasts, and a Hungarian independent pop group refers ironically to Western clichés about melancholy. Current purveyors of Polish electronic music gain confidence for international appearances by drawing on Polish experimental tradition, which was actually kept strong by the Cold War and martial law.

It might seem more appropriate, in accord with today’s ideology of political correctness, to ask a team of from these countries to choose music for a compilation like this. But instead of presenting that kind of a self-portrait or self-portrayal, this compilation evolved according to the principles of a classical portrait: The portraitists, coming from outside devote some time to the object of their desire and finally draw up a highly personal picture of the experience. However, at least some of the principles applied can or should be explained. Of course, there are well-defined and well-functioning genres, such as contemporary classical music (as in Poland and Hungary, with role models like Lutoslawski [1], Ligeti [2] and Kurtág [3]), jazz (represented in Croatia or Poland by seminal musicians such as Tomasz Stanko [4] and Ursula Dudziak [5]), or techno (represented in Slovakia and Slovenia, for example, by Umek [6]) and hip-hop (as in Bulgaria and Poland, represented, for example, by DJ 600 Volt [7]). But these well-defined areas were not our main concern; we were looking for "independent" music and musicians, and right there one might discern a subtle and manipulative strategy of ours, since a very "Western" category hides within this concept. For decades Social Realism---even though it has varied from country to country---has made more or less everything nonofficial and nonacademic pretty "independent" anyway, to say the least. On the other hand, music fitting into a Western category of "independent music" cannot evolve in just a little more than 10 years of capitalistic structures of producing and presenting music. Independence---and some other related conceptual features---seem to constantly move in a floating field opened between old social realism and new capitalistic reality. More and more, from country to country during our travels, we have found that reflecting upon the use of such categories, concepts and expectations has turned out to be a basic means of investigation. This development increased our awareness of the social implications of musical explorations. Our task of exploring new music, experimental sounds and/or independent pop evolved into an exploration of and discussion about social, economic and political changes. Most of all, it clarified the active as well as the reactive role of these musics and musicians within social processes. Of course, it would be marvelous if some of these aspects would be perceptible, even in a 60-minute compilation taken from hundreds of hours of discovered music. The area of Europe formerly known as the East is changing. Eastern Europe as we were used to it has ceased to exist or will soon. Various musics have played and will play an interesting part in this process. This compilation is a snapshot of these developments.

Postscript

Traveling from Vienna to explore the various countries of Eastern Europe makes one feel---not the least for historical reasons---both very close and extremely far away at the same time. To increase our knowledge about our neighbors and to transform our relationship with them, Austrian Broadcasting Corporation’s culturally oriented radio station Österreich 1 has presented a program of weeklong specials under the title Nebenan (Next door) at regular intervals since 2001, concentrating on recent cultural and political developments. Österreich 1 broadcasts a daily 1-hour music series called Zeit-Ton (Tone of the Time), presenting new, experimental and contemporary music. During each of the 1-week Nebenan specials we have presented a condensed survey of current musical developments in our neighboring countries: Hungary, Slovenia, Slovakia, Poland, Bulgaria and Croatia have been featured so far and are represented on the LMJ12 From Gdansk till Dawn compilation [8]; surveys of music from countries such as Romania, Lithuania and the Czech Republic will follow.

Christian Scheib
LMJ 12 CD Co-Curator
Danhausergasse 8/6
A-1040 Vienna
Austria

References and Notes

1. Witold Lutoslawski (1913--1994). His biography and a list of works are available at http://w3.rz-berlin.mpg.de/cmp/lutoslawski.html.

2. Information about György Ligeti (born 1923) is available at http://w3.rz-berlin.mpg.de/cmp/ligeti.html.

3. György Kurtág was born in Lugos (Lugoj, Romania) in 1926, and was educated at the Academy of Budapest, Hungary. Information is available at http://www.karadar.com/Dictionary/kurtag.html and at http://www.bmc.hu/kurtag/index2_en.htm.

4. Information about Polish jazz musician Tomasz Stanko is available at http://www.stanko.polishjazz.com/.

5. Information about fusion vocalist Urszula Dudziak, originally from Poland, is available at http://www.gallery41.com/JazzArtists/UrszulaDudziak.htm.

6. Information about Slovenian techno DJ Uros Umek is available at http://www.godskitchen.com/global/atomicjamdjs/umek.htm.

7. Information about Polish hip-hop artist DJ 600 Volt is available at http://www.hiphopoo.civ.pl/voltszejsetkilo.html. He is included on the compilation album V/A: Verdachtsmomente, Subetage Records 08 (2001) http://www.sra.at/records/209/8913.htm.

8. All the pieces on the CD were originally collected for the Österreich 1 radio program Zeit-Ton, except those produced and provided by EA and Abstract Monarchy Trio especially for this compilation.

Christian Scheib is a musicologist, music jounalist and music producer. He has founded and established several institutions and initiatives, among them the Music Information Center Austria (MICA) and the nationwide pedagogical experiment Klang-Netze. As a curator for the Austrian state department of the arts, he has developed several new music workshop series and festivals as well as supported the ensemble Klangforum Wien. He writes scripts for music documtaries for European TV-stations. He has edited a number of books Das Rauschen ("Static Music," 1995) and Form-Luxus, Kalkül und Abstinenz ("Form," 2000. Bilder–Verbot und Verlangen in Kunst und Musik. ("(No) Graven Image in Music and the Arts," 2001), Transfer/ence---Übertragung ("Music and the Arts in Multiple Realities") is scheduled for release in 2003. He has been lecturer at the California Institute of the Arts (1998) and is currently lecturing on aesthetics at the University of Music Vienna. Scheib is editor of the new-music programs of the Austrian cultural radio station Österreich 1 and the program director of the new music festival musikprotokoll im steirischen herbst http://kultur.orf.at/musikprotokoll. Christian Scheib was born in 1961 and currently lives in Vienna.

Susanna Niedermayr was born in Vienna in 1972. She studied fine art at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna. From 1995 to 2000 she was a member of WochenKlausur http://wochenklausur.t0.or.at, an international group of artists based in Vienna that has made social and political interventions on behalf of art and culture institutions since 1993. Since 1996 she has worked as a freelance radio journalist and web designer for the Austrian Broadcasting Corporation. Among other projects, she worked for 3 years as an editor and moderator with ORF Kunstradio http://www.kunstradio.at. Since the year 2000, Niedermayr has worked mainly for Ö1 Zeit-Ton, a radio program that promotes new and unconventional approaches towards music. She studies political science at the University of Vienna. In 2002 Niedermayr initiated an association called line_in:line_out, for the realization of intercultural projects. At the moment its main focus is to promote music from countries usually classified as Eastern European.